an open letter to Clinical Professor Bobby Smyth at the School of Medicine, Trinity College Dublin
by Brian Ballard Quass, the Drug War Philosopher
November 12, 2022
With respect to your recent Tweet, Bobby:
The reason that cannabis is omnipresent these days is because we have outlawed all of its natural competition. The answer is to re-legalize Mother Nature, which we had no right to outlaw in the first place. It's a clear violation of natural law for a government to tell its citizens what plants they can access. Depression could be solved overnight if we re-legalized the coca leaf, which was used in the form of coca wine by HG Wells, Jules Verne, Henrik Ibsen and Alexandre Dumas, to name a few. As for safety, it was used for millennia by the long-lived Peruvian Indians, until the Spanish enslaved them and started foisting alcohol upon them.
Criminalization is nonsense because people will always seek self-transcendence. That's never going to stop. Prohibition is therefore just a make-work program for law enforcement. The answer is education, not demonization. The prohibition that you champion has killed over 100,000 in Mexico since 2006. When we worry about the safety of kids, we should worry about the kids in Latin America, who continue to lose their lives and/or their parents thanks to the War on Drugs, yes, including the war on cannabis. Why all this death? Because we have decided to "fight plants" instead of fighting ignorance and the prohibition which brings lopsided attention to substances like cannabis.
Author's Follow-up: November 12, 2022
This is why the go-slow approach to drug legalization is a mistake. Instead of acting on principle and denying government's right to criminalize plants and fungi in the first place, we have selected to legalize one single substance, chiefly (let's be honest) because it was the go-to drug for white Americans. The result? Cannabis use has now become the poster child for drug legalization, thereby giving the Neo Drug Warrior the ammunition that he or she needs to blast the whole idea of ending the War on Drugs.
Still, if Bobby really wants to help young people, he would insist that the billions currently being spent on law enforcement in the name of the Drug War would henceforth be spent on substance education instead, which in practical terms would mean that the Drug Enforcement Agency would be replaced by the Drug EDUCATION Agency, and then we would all start being 100% honest about substances -- imagine that -- both as to their subjective and objective benefits and downsides as well as their historical use (as when psychedelics gave Plato a view of the afterlife or coca wine inspired the stories of HG Wells and Jules Verne). I can't speak for Bobby, but I'm afraid that most people in his position do not REALLY want such honesty, because it would force them to admit some inconvenient truths, like the fact that 1 in 4 American women are dependent on Big Pharma meds for life -- proving that the Drug Warriors do not really want us to say no to drugs; rather they want us to say yes to the "right" drugs as judged by Wall Street.
Take me, for instance: Clinical professors protected ME from marijuana. How? By making me a lifetime ward of the healthcare state with tranquilizing "meds" like Effexor. Far from wanting to protect ME from this demoralizing status quo, today's clinical professors are telling me that I have a duty as a patient to "keep taking my meds!"
November 12, 2022
Note: The author writes of Bobby as "championing prohibition." By this, he does not mean that Bobby necessarily supports prohibition explicitly, but rather that the stand he takes on these topics certainly implies such support.
Open Letters
Check out the conversations that I have had so far with the movers and shakers in the drug-war game -- or rather that I have TRIED to have. Actually, most of these people have failed to respond to my calls to parlay, but that need not stop you from reading MY side of these would-be chats.
I don't know what's worse, being ignored entirely or being answered with a simple "Thank you" or "I'll think about it." One writes thousands of words to raise questions that no one else is discussing and they are received and dismissed with a "Thank you." So much for discussion, so much for give-and-take. It's just plain considered bad manners these days to talk honestly about drugs. Academia is living in a fantasy world in which drugs are ignored and/or demonized -- and they are in no hurry to face reality. And so I am considered a troublemaker. This is understandable, of course. One can support gay rights, feminism, and LGBTQ+ today without raising collegiate hackles, but should one dare to talk honestly about drugs, they are exiled from the public commons.
Somebody needs to keep pointing out the sad truth about today's censored academia and how this self-censorship is but one of the many unacknowledged consequences of the Drug War ideology of substance demonization.
The American Philosophy Association should make itself useful and release a statement saying that the drug war is based on fallacious reasoning, namely, the idea that substances can be bad in themselves, without regard for why, when, where and/or how they are used.
I can't imagine Allen Ginsberg writing "Howl!" while under the influence of mood-damping drugs like Inderal and Prozac -- but then maybe that's the point: the powers-that-be do not want poets writing poems like "Howl!"
The best harm-reduction strategy is to re-legalize drugs.
Someone should stand outside Jefferson's estate and hand out leaflets describing the DEA's 1987 raid on Monticello to confiscate poppy plants. That raid was against everything Jefferson stood for. The TJ Foundation DISHONORED JEFFERSON and their visitors should know that!
Think you can handle a horse? So did Christopher Reeves. The fact is, NOBODY can handle a horse. This message brought to you by the Partnership for a Death Free America.
That's so "drug war" of Rick: If a psychoactive substance has a bad use at some dose, for somebody, then it must not be used at any dose by anybody. It's hard to imagine a less scientific proposition, or one more likely to lead to unnecessary suffering.
Proof that materialism is wrong is "in the pudding." It is why scientists are not calling for the use of laughing gas and MDMA by the suicidal. Because they refuse to recognize anything that's obvious. They want their cures to be demonstrated under a microscope.
The drug war is a way for conservatives to keep America's eyes OFF the prize. The right-wing motto is, "Billions for law enforcement, but not one cent for social programs."
We've all been taught since grade school that human beings cannot use psychoactive medicines wisely. That is just a big fat lie. It's criminal to keep substances illegal that can awaken the mind and remind us of our full potential in life.
It's because of such reductive pseudoscience that America will allow us to shock the brains of the depressed but won't allow us to let them use the plant medicines that grow at their feet.
The American Philosophy Association should make itself useful and release a statement saying that the drug war is based on fallacious reasoning, namely, the idea that substances can be bad in themselves, without regard for why, when, where and/or how they are used.